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CHAPTERCHAPTER

Conclusion: The Strategic

Integration of Leadership

T

he time has come to take stock of the enterprise of strategic leadership. As
suggested earlier, at one level, this work is an effort to reinterpret strategic
decision-making processes that occur in some form in every institution.
Strategic thinking may be tacit or self-conscious, fragmented or systematic,
episodic or continuous. Nonetheless, it would be hard to claim that an institution
could function without defining itself and its place in the world through decisions
about its future. Some forms of strategy and reciprocal leadership have to be in
place for academic organizations to function at all.

RECAPITULATION

Starting with these givens, I have attempted to reconceptualize the strategy
process based on an understanding of leadership as a method of direction setting
and sense making rooted in narratives, values, and paradigms. Based on those
meanings, I have tried to show how a systematic approach to strategic leader-
ship offers a coherent and promising method for decision making in colleges and
universities.
The reconceptualization of the strategy process leads to its reformulation. More
than inventing a set of new practices, I have aimed to discover new meanings,
relationships, and possibilities in existing ones. I have suggested that the process
and the discipline of strategic leadership must be woven into the protocols and
structures of collaborative governance. The reformulation changes the form of
strategy by providing it with a comprehensive, systematic, systemic, and integrated
agenda for implementation. As the process unfolds, it can become both embodied
and embedded in the life and work of the organization. In doing so, it exemplifies